“The latest Mac mini, introduced on October 16, 2014, is four years old as of this week,” Joe Rossignol reports for MacRumors. “For emphasis, it has been 1,462 days since the portable desktop computer was last updated, according to the MacRumors Buyer’s Guide.”
“The current lineup, still sold on Apple.com, features five-generation-old Intel dual-core Haswell processors with clock speeds up to 3.0GHz,” Rossignol reports. “Other tech specs include up to 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM, up to 1TB of flash storage, and the choice of Intel HD Graphics 5000 or Intel Iris integrated graphics. Prices start at $499.”
Rossignol reports, “The good news is that the long wait for an update may be coming to an end, as two reliable sources in Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Apple scoopster Mark Gurman both expect a new Mac mini to be released later this year.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: An Apple special media event coming in late October, just before Halloween? A new Mac mini would be a nice treat indeed, after four long years!
SEE ALSO:
Signs point to another Apple special event in October – September 27, 2018
Apple’s 2018 is back-loaded: iPad Pro, MacBook, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, 11-inch iPad Pro coming this fall – July 11, 2018
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Sarah” for the heads up.]
Tim Cook & Co. should be utterly and brutally ashamed for their abysmal performance in keeping ALL Macs current.
This is completely incomprehensible and incompetent. At least:
Slap in a new CPU
Slap in a new GPU
Lower RAM pricing
Lower HD pricing
Offer bigger HDs at the same price.
Lower overall price especially for upgrades!
Throw in a free Keyboard and Mouse?
Offer copious amounts of iCloud storage for 3 years with Apple Care?
Budget price on Apple Music for 1 year?
They need to reinvent the wheel no one asked for or wants first.
As an observer I am laughing. As an investor, I AM APPALLED.
Once upon a time Apple et.al. used to joke that you should never trust a computer you couldn’t lift.
Cook and company don’t believe a computer you can’t put in your pocket with worth a damn.
Can you lift the AWS servers Apple rents for its icloud? I can’t.
Latest Mac Mini is four years old. Latest Mac Pro is five years old.
Give yourself a big pat on the back fellas, Sir Jony and Tim. You have done a superlative job keeping Macs upgraded and current. PCs are no match for Apple.
Yeah, right…
What ever other criticisms I might make of ‘Sir Jony’ I doubt that he is a key component ent of when Macs are updated that would be down to Cook, Sales, Marketing, Strategic and Engineering teams. He can only design what those others give the go ahead to design. He may not be voiceless in that that manegerial pecking order but will not be the biggest voice by far even if for a moment in the post Jobs world we thought, like MDN that he might. Profitability and pip squeezing, not design is king there presently.
You don’t know and I don’t know. Not at all interested because it does not matter. The facts are Apple allowed the two Macs I mentioned to rot on the tree and fall to the ground…
This man helped his mother, who knows nothing about tech, build a hackintosh. He was blindfolded while doing it.
He then demonstrates that this $1400 computer is more powerful than Apple’s iMac Pro.
Great information, thanks. I will be pulling the pro trigger either way in 2019 and this information will come in handy.
Apple owner since my Lisa…
I still have my Mac Mini with a 4-Core i7 CPU in it. Works great. Apple is not the first company to have a winner product and not realize it.
A Mac mini with 4k HDR, and 13 channels of SOUND.
on a side note I recently read a long article about Jony Ive working on the glass of the Apple campus. Glass gets a greenish tint when they are very thick and he wanted it perfectly tint free. So he pulled Apple designers including those working on PRODUCT CASINGS to solve the issue. After tremendous effort they got the glass clear….
wow
multiply this with the thousands of other components at Apple campus . Like the one year and half Apple designers worked on the door handles (perfectly bump and seam free handles
i guess some things are just more important than the second largest hardware money maker at apple: Macs.
With reports of Cue falling asleep at SIRI meetings you have to conclude somebody on top doesn’t have full grip on his SVPs.
And there you have why Sir Jony has little to do with strategic product decisions, Cook has given him a relative free run to design the details of anything or everything big or small till his hearts content, as long as he doesn’t concern himself with talking about product development.
I wonder if Ive wanted a guy working on the Mac Pro to deal with some ‘furniture’, ‘glass flower pot’ issue… will the Mac Manager have the balls to say “No”?
personally I don’t think so.
Also then who do you think drives product development at Apple? Cook who Jobs called ‘not a product guy’ has never shown, or never reported to be much a product seer. I don’t remember in all the years he was COO under Jobs he ever spoke about the ‘future of tech products’ or anything like that or any reports of him ‘hanging out with designers brainstorming new product ideas ‘ as Jobs loved to do . Not Jobs or any of the senior managers past or present has ever said Cook initiated any product when he was COO. The closest today is his desire for ‘health care ‘ initiatives incubated by his time helping Jobs with his cancer — but perhaps there is a REVERSE influence with his acknowledged dislike for the Mac : “Nobody needs a PC” .
The Watch is an excellent product but it was driven by Ive. Ive even said so repeatedly in interviews. Reports also show that the Apple car was initially championed by Ive.
in Ive’s defence during the years he worked on the Campus a couple of managers were assigned to deal with day to day design work. Ive only assumed full command of Apple design when Campus work was over.
Still there are many reports that Apple staff worked like crazy on the Campus under Ive including as my first post said Apple product designers .
Wow, that’s current. You would think Apple was some sort of conglomerate when the reality is they only make a couple of products. Sad!
I want to know what the hell all those employees that Apple do.
NOT FOR LONG
All things considered, removing features (the option to replace/upgrade ram and hard drives) is a downgrade, not an update.
Had the mini been non-upgradable from the beginning, it would be a non-issue. Oh sure, some people would have complained… because in the tech world there’s always some who complain about what something doesn’t have when it’s introduced. However, those complaints wouldn’t have been anything like they have been with taking away those options.
Had Apple intro’d the mini as a non-upgradable Mac and added ram/HD upgradability in 2014, Mac users would have been beside themselves. And likely wouldn’t be complaining so much about the lack of mini updates since then.
I think the mini is the proverbial red-headed step-child in Apple’s world. They don’t know what to do with it… and just might even be a little afraid of it.
The last update to the Mac Mini May be 4 years old but the last UPGRADE to the Mac mini is 6 years old.
I LOVE my 2012 Mac Mini with a Quad Core CPU, 16 GB of user installed memory, and an user installed 2 TB SSD.
Apple – WTF are you doing with all those Mac departments and resources when you usually only bump the damn specs?
Current Apple desktop line is obsolete almost at every level. Regarding the CPUs on current Macs, it is a shame they expect people to buy a desktop from them. Apple may have their sight in 2020 with new proprietary CPU but we all need to get there step by step.
I picked up one of these 2014 Mac Minis off eBay for $399 to replace my aging 2010 Mac Mini. Icore5, 1tb drive and 16gb ram. It gave me a nice speed bump and for what I paid I won’t feel too bad if a new version is released at the end of the month.
That being said, letting the Mac Mini languish for 4 years certainly earns Cook and Apple unending grief from their customers.
I think I know why Apple has so much trouble updating the mini. If they produce a Mini powerful enough it will perform to close to the iMac line and adding Thunderbolt 3 will allow you to chose the GPU and non-Apple peripherals you may need. So the Mini will cannibalize the iMac. Then, if Apple makes the iMac powerful enough with a current desktop 8-core CPU the regular iMac will render the entry-level iMac Pro not very appealing at 5k. So Apple needs to update the iMac Pro too.
This is what happens when a company stops thinking about the user and it is all mostly to please themselves. Sorry, Apple I need repeated solid demonstrations you care about Mac users.
Let’s just do a simple honest comparison between the top spec Mac Mini and the top spec HP Elitedesk 800 (G3):
tech specs, Mac / HP
Processor: Intel Core i5 or i7 (2 core) / Intel i5-7500T (4 core) — the HP has almost exactly twice the raw computing power
Storage: 5400 rpm 500GB or 1TB disc drive or Fusion drive / 256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ SSD — Apple offers larger size but drastically slower performance
Memory: 8GB or 16GB / 8 GB DDR4-2400 SDRAM upgradeable to 16GB – tie
Graphics: Intel Iris / Intel HD Graphics 630 — Mac is embarrassed badly
Expansion Slots: Mac has no clue / HP has 2
Fastest data port: Mac has Thunderbolt 2 / HP has USB Type C (3.1)
Price: This is tricky because there is no exact comparison, but if one chooses the i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and 256 GB flash memory for the Mac, the comparison is:
Mac $1399 / HP $1039
This makes the Mac approximately 35% more expensive for a product that is not 35% better, and is in many areas worse.
Cook of course is not compelled to update or correct the price of its aging Macs because the Mac represents user freedom, true personal computing. Cook wants you to rent iCloud space and buy 100% of your watered down iPad apps from Apple. Power and productivity be damned, Apple is all about forcing subscription computing now.
I know most beginners don’t care about tech nitty gritty, but let’s examine closer to prove a point about how badly managed the Mac business is:
The most powerful currently available Mac Mini (A1347) sports a 2 core Haswell chipset, 22mm die size. It uses 1600 MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM when the rest of the industry is at least pushing 2400 MHz. Unlike just about every Windows PC in the world, the overpriced RAM on the Mac Mini cannot be upgraded by the user. The graphics processor in the Mac shares system memory. The Bluetooth card does not support the latest v5.0 spec. It does not support USB-C connectivity. It has only one drive bay, so Time Machine cannot save to an internal backup disc. Finally, the Mac Mini is actually larger than the comparable HP EliteDesk.
This, friends, is what happens when feckless management is out to lunch for 6 years. The 2014 model was a design step backward, and ever since Apple has been coasting. Just like everything else one could remotely call professional or creative that is left in the Apple world. Thanks for nothing Cook.